I always enjoy making the end of the year lists. There's really no purpose to mine at this point (mine are going on this site, and this site only this year, meaning that roughly five people will even glance at it), but there's something satisfyingly conclusive about it, a way to take one final taste of everything before cleansing the palette for next year's offerings.

Unfortunately, I can't even do a best of list probably for another week or two, because the award-mongerers see it fit to release all of their big guns at the end of December to put them in the Oscar conversation - most people will agree that this is unfair for the adults who had to sit through a year of Jack and Jill just to get two good weeks of film during the time of year that most people are spending with their families away from the theater, not to mention that it's completely illogical from a box-office standpoint, but who am I to argue with a bunch of gasoline-huffing executive suits? But what I can do is list the worst things I've seen this year, because the only possible way I'm going to see any films worst than these stinkers is if somebody films themselves digging up my grandmother's corpse and nakedly pleasuring themselves on camera with her clavicle.

With that beautiful thought in mind, here are six movies from this year that I hated! Join me with your own, won't you?

The Human Centipede 2: Full SequenceIn interest of full disclosure, I very much enjoyed the first Human Centipede movie. Not because of the ass-to-mouth action (bonus!), but because of how refreshingly straightforward it was. It wasn't a remake, it wasn't an homage, it wasn't a parody, it wasn't trying to be a deep commentary on the human condition. It wasn't even a particularly intelligent film. It was just an entertaining exploitation film about sweet, sweet human centipede love.

The sequel takes this formula and completely muffs it up by adding postmodernism commentary into the mix, which is hilarious coming from a director whose bread-and-butter is in making boilerplate shock films. Hey, asshole, I came here to see actor's mouths get sewn to other actor's buttcheeks, not to be ham-handedly preached at about the effects of violent film on society from the sort of tool who thinks that wearing a cowboy hat and sunglasses everywhere 24/7 makes him interesting.

And why the hell is it filmed in black and white? Is this movie supposed to be a postmodern mockery of postmodern movies? Have we really gone that far down the rabbit hole? Goddammit.

Transformers 3: The Dark of the MoonI'm not going to dwell on this one, as more than enough words have been wasted on it already. It's iconic of everything that's wrong with modern blockbusters. Moving on.

Passion PlayThis one, on the other hand, is the sort of film that you get fooled into thinking may actually have potential in spite of the bad reviews, simply because of how unconventional the premise sounds when you read about it. Washed-up trumpet players! Ladies with angel wings! Circuses in the desert! Suspense! Intrigue! Bill Murray playing a gangster! Surely, there could just be a difference of taste involved in a recipe as polarizing as this one sounds, right?

But the actual movie is surprisingly difficult to get through, for all of the strangeness in the mix. It's dull. The central romance is so cloying that the project could easily have been repackaged as a Stephanie Meyer joint without anybody looking twice. Nothing in the film, from the performances down to the dialogue, has any - oh god I'm gonna say it - believable passion. Instead of being, at the very least, an interesting mess, it's just a middling drama that feels like a chore to sit through.

Red StateThis movie has the most infuriating final act of any film this year and Kevin Smith is a lazy, juvenile coward who can't follow through on the arguments he starts himself because it's easier to blow raspberries like a two-year-old than put together a cohesive statement on anything. In that regard, this movie is even worse than Dogma and even quite possibly the worst of Smith's career. Next.

ChilleramaI feel like the recent wave of cheesy grindhouse revivals has to break soon, and the quicker the better. This one stands as a prime example of the subgenre's lack of creativity, relying entirely on crude humor and self-aware references for the two hour (two hour?!) running stretch, which is regrettable since there are actually several people involved that I have a decent level of respect for.

To be fair, it may just be that this film is too good at emulating its progenitor; if Super, as a film, miraculously channeled everything I used to love about Troma, Chillerama is a sobering reminder of the production company's less appealing characteristics. Namely of that gaudy, shock-centric, Troma-patented of humor that can be summed up best with bike horns and dead babies. Oh man, that zombie totally bit my dick off and now he's using it as a drinking straw, honk honk! Not exactly high art to start with.

But you know what? Even with that consideration, this doesn't work. That's because, however hard these homage films try, they're never the real deal. Guys like Kaufman can get away with more because they're the underdogs with nothing to lose and, at the end of the day, we mostly just want them to win because they're smaller than everybody else. When they make some low-budget schlock with bad special effects and low-brow humor it's quaint, and therefore charming. Homages from fanboy directors with actual, you know, money and materials, actually ATTEMPTING to be terrible can only, at best, be slightly more expensive photocopies. Or fan masturbation material.

I hated this movie so much that I quit halfway though, then went back to finish it later so that I could complain about how terrible it is. That's how dedicated I am to this movie's badness.

Sucker PunchThere are two reasons that Sucker Punch is worse than every Transformers flick Michael Bay has ever put out, including the sequel he did with the robot balls and racist ghetto bots:

1) No Transformers movie has ever been as irritatingly self-congratulatory and pretentious as pretty much everything in Sucker Punch is. Which isn't to say that Transformers movies aren't self-important, but past the epic tones and Michael Bay's expression of his love for Michael Bay through way of blowing up every single prop on his sets at least six times, Transformers are always ultimately movies about giant machines punching the shit out of each other. Sucker Punch in comparison is the Human Centipede 2 of giant action movies.

2) Michael Bay is a shallow, womanizing lech, but I don't recall him ever using his films to exploit and fetishize young girls dressed as even younger girls while they're psychologically and physically molested in alluring ways, then using said material to pretend that he's making a grand feminist statement celebrating powerful women. The idea that a plot has been cobbled together out of somebody's wet dream more often than not leaves one feeling unclean, and that's just when the movie isn't edging dangerously close to guro territory. Mocking the audience's intelligence at the same time is a cheap blow.

Dammit, Snyder, your only talent to begin with was in your ability to make movies look pretty, and you couldn't even do that? Why is this movie teal and orange? WHY IS EVERYTHING TEAL AND ORANGE???

Fin.

_________________"Just remember this: all agents defect and all resisters sell out. That's the sad truth, Bill... and a writer? A writerlives the sad truth like anyone else. The only difference is he files a report on it." ~Naked Lunch

Granted I am not much of a movie watcher and don't see very many movies the year they are released, but I agree with Sucker Punch so hard. The fights scenes were very nice, everything else? Not mo such. I was with it through the asylum part and then when it went to to a brothel out of the blue? WTF? Then the "dancing". Ugh. And to top it off the ridiculous clothing in the yet another alternate reality/dream/I don't even care anymore? Shoot me. Two of the three would have been ok. Make her a mental patient escaping to fantasy OR make her a forced hooker and do the same. The reality(?) within a reality(?) within an anime knockoff was too much.

To be honest, I sort of slingshot back and forth between looking forward to the movie, because I wanted to see if Snyder was actually capable of writing something himself, and dreading it because of how dry the trailers came off and the word of mouth. So I went in anticipating something awful, but felt relief for the first ten minutes or so thinking, "Huh, well, maybe this won't be as bad as I thought". Sure, things about it were silly and melodramatic, but it was still pretty watchable and most of the dumber details could be forgiven.

Then it got to the part where Baby Doll had to create a world inside of her head to escape her pain and she changes the mental hospital into... a whorehouse? Where she's the star whore? What is the metaphor here, that being a mental patient is like being a prostitute? That abused women empower themselves in their minds by imagining themselves as enslaved whores?

But then I realized that it didn't have to make sense because it was actually just an excuse to put hot girls into tight leather outfits. Which would be fine in another movie, but here it's just weird and sleazy because of the context it sits in.

I'm not even suggesting that Snyder did this to be sneaky or sleazy or misogynistic or underhanded, either. I think it's entirely likely that he's none of those things and this movies was well-intended. More likely, the problem is more just that Snyder is really, really dumb.

The action sequences didn't work for me either, partly because there were no real-world consequences in a dream sequence if somebody dies which made everything in the sequences distant and unengaging, but mostly I think it's just that they were so uninspired. They were all just mash-ups of things that have already been done to death. I mean, you can do anything in your dreams, anything, and all this girl can come up with is a derivative steampunk Lord of the Rings anime fantasy?

And another thing: speaking of derivative, how uninspired was the soundtrack for this thing? It's a movie about dreaming, and all of the tracks are like Sweet Dreams (Are made of this), Where is My Mind, White Rabbit and Asleep? Even ignoring that those songs have already been used to iconic effect in other high-profile movies that Snyder has surely seen and something fresher would be nice, how fucking literal-minded do you have to be to use those songs seriously in what is touting itself as an intellectual film?

And another thing: where is the dream logic? No level of dreaming in this movie seemed to be connected to anything happening on any other level. It made the entire movie a clusterfuck of disconnected bullshit.

And another thing: that fucking ending? The happy ending of Baby Doll's story is that she gets to live in fantasy dragon-land in her tiny, slutty schoolgirl outfit forever? Won't she get bored there? I was bored there. Even if she was actually happy there, that's not supposed to be fucked-up that something like that would be what makes her happy?

And another thing: Baby Doll was twenty. Why didn't she just, you know, leave? Or throw her dad out, since she had control of the estate after her mom died apparently. Then sue for custody of her sister, since her dad was so clearly a weird, rapey, alcoholic creep?

And another thing: what was the point of the leathery old wise-man? Was he supposed to be a father figure? Did he realize that every instruction he stated came out either sounding either stupid as hell or insultingly condescending?

And another thing: fucking lollipops? Really?

And another thing

And ano

_________________"Just remember this: all agents defect and all resisters sell out. That's the sad truth, Bill... and a writer? A writerlives the sad truth like anyone else. The only difference is he files a report on it." ~Naked Lunch

Oh, and on the old wise man too: so... Baby Doll is tormented by her father, then the male orderly at the hospital. Even in her weird whore fantasy she's forced to dance for paying men's enjoyment. Being literally imprisoned, the only way that she can find freedom is to look further inward to her own mind. So she goes deeper and deeper down to find her female empowerment and liberation... and, ultimately, just ends up taking orders from another man?

_________________"Just remember this: all agents defect and all resisters sell out. That's the sad truth, Bill... and a writer? A writerlives the sad truth like anyone else. The only difference is he files a report on it." ~Naked Lunch

When I first saw previews, I kind of wanted to see it. I can deal with skimp clothes if the rest if awesome enough and their fight scenes did look awesome. Then a friend of mine went to see it for his birthday and told anyone who would listen that it was crap and don't waste your money. I heeded that advice until a month ago when this guy I was sort of dating decided that we should watch a movie so I grabbed this off the shelf because he said that it was pretty good. Um. Yeah. 15 - 20 minutes in I was done, but I stuck it out like the masochist I am. Only movie that I never finished was Twilight and I couldn't even get through the first 30 mins and I was drunk. I think I gave up around the van scene. Alas, I digress.

Anyways, after watching it, I looked up some reviews and other stuff about it. Most were 50/50 misogynistic vs female empowerment. Personally, not to get all feminist and blah blah blah, I think it is quite a let down on the female empowerment angle. As you said, Babydoll (right off the bat with the infantalizing of the main character) is a legal adult. She should have just taken what was legally hers and he sister's and got the fuck out of there if kicking that bastard of a stepdad out wouldn't work.

I think Snyder is in the mindset that many people I have come across are. The mindset that skimpy clothing IS empowering. That being a stripper IS empowering. While I can't fully disagree with that since I believe women should make their own choices on those sorts of things, what I DO disagree with is that none of that MADE SENSE. Oh my, I am now stuck in this loony bin. I wanna escape reality. What shall I daydream of? An adventurer on a safari? A pilot flying to neato places. I have it! I WILL BE A LADY WHO IS FORCED TO BE A WHORE. YES. PERFECT. I know, she was the one who imagined herself as a whore, but that is what I am getting at with the whole empowered but really not thing. I noticed that she was going around and some what getting revenge on the dudes that weren't good people but then it dawned on me that she wasn't really getting revenge and was just stealing from them so that somewhat deflated that.

The anime/game styled action scenes were... ok at best in the sense of action. To me that fell into a lot of video game and anime traps of chain mail bikinis = supah armor! That is a discussion that I have had many time with many people, mostly guys. They would claim that women would only play games where they could play as a young/beautiful character. I would disagree. They would then shoot back then why are there no old/ugly characters? I would then say well that is because the developers don't make them. One of my favorite example is the female troll model in WoW. They went from a very troll looking one in the alpha to a blue skinned human edit. What I am getting too is that I believe that a good chunk of people are afraid to make non young/beautiful characters which then leads into being afraid people won't like them if they aren't barely half dressed. I mean, what else do they have going for them? Good character development or plot?

What it comes down to is that I honestly can't see someone who was really going for a female empowerment movie would make a movie like this. It takes all the most argued against cliches and throws them all together in the way people argue about them. So I can agree that Snyder probably didn't do this to be misogynistic or anything, but he ended up coming across that way due to how he made this movie. Every step he took dug him a deeper and deeper hole that just couldn't climb out of, though I think he tried at the end.

I think Snyder is in the mindset that many people I have come across are. The mindset that skimpy clothing IS empowering. That being a stripper IS empowering. While I can't fully disagree with that since I believe women should make their own choices on those sorts of things, what I DO disagree with is that none of that MADE SENSE. Oh my, I am now stuck in this loony bin. I wanna escape reality. What shall I daydream of? An adventurer on a safari? A pilot flying to neato places. I have it! I WILL BE A LADY WHO IS FORCED TO BE A WHORE. YES. PERFECT. I know, she was the one who imagined herself as a whore, but that is what I am getting at with the whole empowered but really not thing. I noticed that she was going around and some what getting revenge on the dudes that weren't good people but then it dawned on me that she wasn't really getting revenge and was just stealing from them so that somewhat deflated that.

To be fair, I think there is an excellent arguement for acting and dressing seductive being a statement of female empowerment, if you're interested in talking about this.

Taking a film like Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill! as an example, a film which both features strippers and which I would argue to be the first out-and-out feminist film, the difference between the characterization in that film and the whores in a film like Sucker Punch is largely a matter of context and tone. The girls in Sucker Punch are offered up as fetish objects: they start the film infantilized (nice term, by the way) and end it infantilized, but with less clothes on; they're basically sex slaves and constantly under command of their male counterparts regardless of which reality Babydoll imagines for herself, spending most of the movie being beaten and molested and looking really, really attractive while being so, which is frankly pretty disturbing. This could actually be a good lead-in to a point about exploitation of women on film, mind, if Snyder weren't so determined to have his cake and eat it too, criticizing the treatment of women while dolling them up and manipulating them onscreen to please the male audience, exactly as he's been preaching against for the last hour. It's an extremely hypocritical work.

Faster Pussycat, on the other hand...

The funny thing is, I'm almost positive that Snyder saw this movie before making Sucker Punch, but there's a huge difference in how the women here were liberated, healthy and happy in their sexuality. They met the men on even ground; they were both objectified and the objectifiers, fully in control of their own being. They understood how effective of a weapon sex could be, that it could be manipulated to their will in order to gain some advantage through control of it.

What really drives me insane about most modern girl power movies is that the solution is always simply to do what a guy would do. Machine-gunning down a dragon and kicking it in the face is a male solution to a problem. There's a whole long history of this phenomenon, which blatantly ignores that women are physically smaller by nature, they're not going to be able to punch a guy twice their size down to the ground. Likeliness is that we're not going to best somebody through physical confrontation without a little forethought and a scenario is not exactly empowering if the first thought in your head is to laugh because of how fucking implausible it is. There's a reason why most of the best feminist figures in film are of the seductive femme fatale type - they were both strong and feminine, and clever enough to recognize that sex is one of the best psychological weapons in our arsenal. It's naturally available to us.

The best example of an effective feminist film, to my mind, will always be I Spit on Your Grave. The female protagonist accidentally attracts three men who brutally rape her, but the second half of the film completely subverts this when she takes that same sexual quality which drew them in the first place and uses it to fight back, ultimately getting the best of them through her own resourcefulness and refusal to just lay down and take the objectification - as opposed to Babydoll, who physically does nothing to better her condition, choosing instead to retreat into of her own imagination and pretend to swordfight zombies while being lackadaisically subjugated in the real world.

Bikini armor will always be stupid though.

Mirari Irarim wrote:

[...]That is a discussion that I have had many time with many people, mostly guys. They would claim that women would only play games where they could play as a young/beautiful character. I would disagree. They would then shoot back then why are there no old/ugly characters? I would then say well that is because the developers don't make them. One of my favorite example is the female troll model in WoW. They went from a very troll looking one in the alpha to a blue skinned human edit. What I am getting too is that I believe that a good chunk of people are afraid to make non young/beautiful characters which then leads into being afraid people won't like them if they aren't barely half dressed. I mean, what else do they have going for them? Good character development or plot?

Agreed.

Mirari Irarim wrote:

What it comes down to is that I honestly can't see someone who was really going for a female empowerment movie would make a movie like this. It takes all the most argued against cliches and throws them all together in the way people argue about them. So I can agree that Snyder probably didn't do this to be misogynistic or anything, but he ended up coming across that way due to how he made this movie. Every step he took dug him a deeper and deeper hole that just couldn't climb out of, though I think he tried at the end.

The only thing is that Snyder was trying to make a female empowerment piece. Even if my radar hadn't been going into overdrive watching the actual film (which it was, the movie's just riddled with bad metaphors), he sold the feminist angle in every promotional interview preceding the release of the film.

But, like I said, I don't think he's intentionally being a misogynist either. I just think it's the same problem that made him goof up Watchmen so badly - he's just not good with anything that deals heavily in subtext, and it becomes even more obvious when he tries to write his own subtext. He's just kind of a fool, dealing in business he has no justification to deal in.

_________________"Just remember this: all agents defect and all resisters sell out. That's the sad truth, Bill... and a writer? A writerlives the sad truth like anyone else. The only difference is he files a report on it." ~Naked Lunch

When director Zack Snyder directed comic book adaptations of 300 and Watchmen, comic book movie fans already had a pretty good idea of what was in store for them. However, his latest movie, Sucker Punch, though visually striking, seems to be a confusing mystery to most. In a recent interview with ScreenJunkies, Snyder explained just exactly what the title of the movie means.

I think sucker punch sums it up for me. Look, literally it’s like a mechanism in the film that kind of brings us back into reality I think. But I think on the other hand, because the movie is a slight indictment – it talks about geek culture and pop culture, it talks about the why of the action cinema and stuff of that nature – it’s also a sucker punch because I kind of designed it that you go to this movie for entertainment and you get a little bit f*cked up by it, hopefully.

Snyder went on to say that the plot is completely open to interpretation.

Oh, hugely. It’s all about that. She’s talking all about the movie when she says to Baby, “The dance” – meaning the action sequences – “should be more than just titillation,” which is in reference to other films I’ve made. When she says, “all that gyrating and moaning” which is basically all the slo-mo and all the action. It’s supposed to tell a story. Then she says, “My dance is personal. What is yours saying?” and “It says I’m going to be free” which is in reference to all the other, 300 or other action movies. The whole movie is like a show within a show and it’s all about the show within a show. Someone asked me, why are the girls dressed like that? I go, because if you’re indictment of male culture and on the other hand the idea that they’re in a brothel, so the people that are wanting the girls to dress like that are the men that go to brothel. When we see the action in the movie and the lights go down, the leering men sitting in a dark theater find girls that dress sexy and gyrate, and in my case that are gyrating with machine guns, that’s us! Anyway, and on and on.

Snyder said that he wants Sucker Punch to appeal to those looking for hidden meanings, as well as those fans who just want "crazy sh*t" in the movie.

I honestly think you can do both. I love crazy shit in a movie, don’t get me wrong. By the way, there is crazy sh*t in my movie. There is nutty, crazy shit in it but I’d like you to be able to have your cake and eat it too. I want you to be able to just go nuts and then also be able to sit with your friends afterwards and go, “No way, dude. You don’t get the socio-implications of this f*ckin’ movie.” And the other guy going, “I don’t know what the f*ck you’re talking about!”

What the fuck is he talking about? That's like ten different things that don't fit together.

_________________"Just remember this: all agents defect and all resisters sell out. That's the sad truth, Bill... and a writer? A writerlives the sad truth like anyone else. The only difference is he files a report on it." ~Naked Lunch

My girlfriend and I liked Sucker Punch, admitting to one another we had no idea what he was going for, but we found it enjoyable to eat popcorn at.

I didn't even get that out of it, sadly. I just felt like I was watching somebody else play a video game for two hours, which is the least fun way to spend time with a video game.

Creamer wrote:

Personally, Drive was easily the worst movie I've seen this year.

I absolutely loved Drive.

_________________"Just remember this: all agents defect and all resisters sell out. That's the sad truth, Bill... and a writer? A writerlives the sad truth like anyone else. The only difference is he files a report on it." ~Naked Lunch

To be fair, I think there is an excellent arguement for acting and dressing seductive being a statement of female empowerment, if you're interested in talking about this.

I am always interested in talking about this. This sort of discussion is right up my alley.

Lyarnos wrote:

Taking a film like Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill! as an example, a film which both features strippers and which I would argue to be the first out-and-out feminist film, the difference between the characterization in that film and the whores in a film like Sucker Punch is largely a matter of context and tone. The girls in Sucker Punch are offered up as fetish objects: they start the film infantilized (nice term, by the way) and end it infantilized, but with less clothes on; they're basically sex slaves and constantly under command of their male counterparts regardless of which reality Babydoll imagines for herself, spending most of the movie being beaten and molested and looking really, really attractive while being so, which is frankly pretty disturbing. This could actually be a good lead-in to a point about exploitation of women on film, mind, if Snyder weren't so determined to have his cake and eat it too, criticizing the treatment of women while dolling them up and manipulating them onscreen to please the male audience, exactly as he's been preaching against for the last hour. It's an extremely hypocritical work.

Fetish objects is a good way of putting it. I see nothing wrong with making a moving about exploitation, whether it be in a good or bad light. I am mature enough to realize that not everyone has the same opinions as me so not everything will be my cup of tea. So if someone wants to make a movie about women prancing about in next to nothing, they should be able to. It is when it becomes, like you said, hypocritical that I take issue. Snyder can talk all he wants about how is empowerment, but when he never shows it on screen, all his explaining is moot.

Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill! looks awesome and I am going to be checking Netflix for that tonight.

Lyarnos wrote:

The funny thing is, I'm almost positive that Snyder saw this movie before making Sucker Punch, but there's a huge difference in how the women here were liberated, healthy and happy in their sexuality. They met the men on even ground; they were both objectified and the objectifiers, fully in control of their own being. They understood how effective of a weapon sex could be, that it could be manipulated to their will in order to gain some advantage through control of it.

Maybe he doesn't realize just how skeevy his "sex slavery" thing is? From what I could tell from the clip you showed, those three ladies seemed to NOT have been forced into stripping. Then again, maybe he was going for a squick thing which doesn't help his claims of it being a feminist movie.

Lyarnos wrote:

What really drives me insane about most modern girl power movies is that the solution is always simply to do what a guy would do. Machine-gunning down a dragon and kicking it in the face is a male solution to a problem. There's a whole long history of this phenomenon, which blatantly ignores that women are physically smaller by nature, they're not going to be able to punch a guy twice their size down to the ground. Likeliness is that we're not going to best somebody through physical confrontation without a little forethought and a scenario is not exactly empowering if the first thought in your head is to laugh because of how fucking implausible it is. There's a reason why most of the best feminist figures in film are of the seductive femme fatale type - they were both strong and feminine, and clever enough to recognize that sex is one of the best psychological weapons in our arsenal. It's naturally available to us.

Hahahaha. Right on. It's pretty freaking ridiculous when male characters do that too.

Lyarnos wrote:

The best example of an effective feminist film, to my mind, will always be I Spit on Your Grave. The female protagonist accidentally attracts three men who brutally rape her, but the second half of the film completely subverts this when she takes that same sexual quality which drew them in the first place and uses it to fight back, ultimately getting the best of them through her own resourcefulness and refusal to just lay down and take the objectification - as opposed to Babydoll, who physically does nothing to better her condition, choosing instead to retreat into of her own imagination and pretend to swordfight zombies while being lackadaisically subjugated in the real world.

Babydoll doing nothing isn't even too horrible of thing to happen. I can understand having a character end up so beat down and feeling so hopeless that all they feel like they can do is retreat into their head. As I said earlier, if he would have cut either the asylum or the brothel, I wouldn't have had such a problem with this movie. Either one of those situations would be grounds for rampant escapism daydreaming. I just cannot fathom them both together like they were. When one daydreams in such a way, one doesn't not simply put themselves into roughly the same situation but with less clothing.

Lyarnos wrote:

The only thing is that Snyder was trying to make a female empowerment piece. Even if my radar hadn't been going into overdrive watching the actual film (which it was, the movie's just riddled with bad metaphors), he sold the feminist angle in every promotional interview preceding the release of the film.

But, like I said, I don't think he's intentionally being a misogynist either. I just think it's the same problem that made him goof up Watchmen so badly - he's just not good with anything that deals heavily in subtext, and it becomes even more obvious when he tries to write his own subtext. He's just kind of a fool, dealing in business he has no justification to deal in.

It seems that he just doesn't take the time to actually LOOK at what he is doing. He needs to review what he is trying to say and see if he says it clearly. As long as it isn't a case of "I am so awesome and deep, why doesn't any get meeeee?" I think he can improve.

King Guacamole wrote:

My girlfriend and I liked Sucker Punch, admitting to one another we had no idea what he was going for, but we found it enjoyable to eat popcorn at.

I guess I just think too much. My mind was going a million miles a minute trying to make sense of the inconsistencies. Fright Night, however, was a good popcorn movie.

Again, sorry if any of this seems incoherent. Pain meds are kicking my ass.

Fetish objects is a good way of putting it. I see nothing wrong with making a moving about exploitation, whether it be in a good or bad light. I am mature enough to realize that not everyone has the same opinions as me so not everything will be my cup of tea. So if someone wants to make a movie about women prancing about in next to nothing, they should be able to. It is when it becomes, like you said, hypocritical that I take issue. Snyder can talk all he wants about how is empowerment, but when he never shows it on screen, all his explaining is moot.

Pretty much that. As somebody who actively enjoys exploitation films, I think putting sex and nudity on display for both women as well as men is fine. The only time I find it offensive is when it's either unapologetically abusive or hypocritical. Russ Meyer (who made Faster Pussycat, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, etc.) was very up front about his movies just being goofy exploitation flicks - the big difference between his stuff and the other pictures of the era was that while the women took off their clothes, the men did too and there was no pretentiousness involved, it was always in good fun. Meyer was also a man who clearly loved women in all respects and commonly placed the female voice at the forefront of his films. Which is cool. I'm not saying that movies with strong female characters have to deal in sex, but there's also nothing shameful in working from that angle, in spite of what a lot of the more extreme feminists think. It's such a huge part of who we are as a species that it seems naive to deny it completely.

As far as Sucker Punch goes... even ignoring the "this movie is misogynistic" angle, it's just kind of insulting to parade your characters around in fuck-me boots while telling your audience how terrible they are for objectifying women, you know? It'd be like serving somebody delicious homemade chocolate cake, then chastising them every time they take a bite of it.

But even if what Snyder was arguing were true, wouldn't there be a level where that image would break? Okay, in the fantasy sequences she's going to dress and act like a slut apparently, there's no way around that. But she was already this beautifully pouty, child-like figure that dressed herself willingly in the porn pigtails on the "realistic" real-world level. If the message is "shame on us for making this woman an object", shouldn't she be more of a, you know, real girl there so we can see the difference between an actual female and the way men apparently perceive them?

Mirari Irarim wrote:

Babydoll doing nothing isn't even too horrible of thing to happen. I can understand having a character end up so beat down and feeling so hopeless that all they feel like they can do is retreat into their head. As I said earlier, if he would have cut either the asylum or the brothel, I wouldn't have had such a problem with this movie. Either one of those situations would be grounds for rampant escapism daydreaming. I just cannot fathom them both together like they were. When one daydreams in such a way, one doesn't not simply put themselves into roughly the same situation but with less clothing.

Yeah, I kind of agree with that. Honestly, if they'd just removed the whorehouse thing altogether, I could have halfway bought the movie - having that third fantasy sequence sandwiched between the asylum and the fighting sequences made any possible chance the movie had at logic collapse.

That's one of the other big things that drove me crazy - none of the dream "levels" seemed to have anything to do with what was happening on the levels on top of it. Okay, so she's in an insane asylum that's now a whorehouse? Why is it a whorehouse? How does the stuff that's going on here immediately translate to what happens in the asylum? What does flying in a WWII plane have to do with stealing a knife? I get that there's supposedly some figurative connection, but the none of the physical actions seem to have anything to do with anything else. It's just this big clusterfuck where nothing happening has any real consequence.

Mirari Irarim wrote:

I guess I just think too much. My mind was going a million miles a minute trying to make sense of the inconsistencies. Fright Night, however, was a good popcorn movie.

Have you ever watched the original Fright Night? It's one of those movies I like, but it's a pretty silly movie. I mostly like it because of the neat practical effects and Roddy McDowall's character. I haven't seen the remake at all though and wondered how it matches up.

_________________"Just remember this: all agents defect and all resisters sell out. That's the sad truth, Bill... and a writer? A writerlives the sad truth like anyone else. The only difference is he files a report on it." ~Naked Lunch

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